Michael Caruso Was Different

Michael Caruso Was Different

Mid-1980s West Fort Lauderdale was, by and large, a “God and Guns” jerkwater. My housing block ended where the Everglades began. Davie, a city not half an hour’s drive from my home, held Saturday morning streetside Klan coteries during daylight hours. At best, the biome was inconducive to intellectualism and/or independent thinking. At worst, it was downright inhospitable.

Michael Caruso was fundamentally different from his classmates. He read for pleasure. He didn’t follow sports. Garbage Pail Kids were beneath him. Worse still, Caruso’s adolescent contemporaries were acquainted with him by virtue of shared Southern Baptist school ties. His incipient individuality amounted to social suicide by 1,000 papercuts.

In fairness to his peers, Caruso’s off-putting quirks were neither few nor far between. Even at 11/12, he had a put-upon, condescending way about him. He was the quintessential know-it-all. Though I know nothing of what became of him in the last 35 years, I’ll wager that he works in tech support, sighing melodramatically before answering any question put to him.

One otherwise unmemorable school day, Caruso made known that he’d be moving to Arizona in two weeks’ time. His announcement was met with abject indifference.

Fast forward a fortnight. As father and son were boarding their flight, some disaffected loner took Michael hostage at gunpoint. To the best of my recollection, the kidnapper’s motives were entirely unclear, even to him. While I can’t recall specifics, he’d hit a rough patch, fallen on hard times, something along those lines. In short, his deed was a desperate man’s very vocal cry for help. Fortunately, following a brief standoff, the gunman surrendered without incident.

Not more than one week later, apropos of nothing, our teacher announced that Michael would be popping by that day, his move having been postponed for obvious reasons. News of Caruso’s return met with little more interest than that of his exile departure, until she mentioned that he’d be rendezvousing with an honest-to-God news crew. Said crew meant to shoot a segment detailing Caruso’s daily routine before crossing paths with the kind of malcontented mental case the NRA profits from arming. With that, Caruso’s approval ratings skyrocketed. See, in a pre-YouTube, pre-Tik Tok epoch, network news was the only known necromancer powerful enough to transform Average Joes into overnight sensations.

Despite orders to do nothing of the sort, I set about dolling myself up to catch the camera eye. The instant our teacher turned toward the blackboard, I whipped up a technicolor tableau wishing Michael the “best of luck” in all his future endeavors. The ruse worked like a charm. Suffice it to say that my characterization of our class pariah rivaled a press junket for an A-list director’s pretentious vanity project, “‘Insert director’s name here’ is so enlightened he should be perched atop a mountain in Tibet!”

What thoughts, I wonder, went through Caruso’s head when he found himself the guest of honor at an ego-stroking orgy. If he was surprised by the tickertape parade, he never let on. Rather, he busied himself basking in the limelight. From the first second of his second coming, Michael was subdued yet ebullient, as if he’d lived one thousand lifetimes since we’d last seen him. His recitation of the narrative was pure pretense: he’d not been the least bit frightened, as his kidnapper had confided early on that the gun was unloaded. As per Caruso, he patiently passed the time until his ordeal ran its course. As he told his tale far too matter-of-factly for my taste, he strolled past his former peers tipping nods as if to say, “I remember when I was but one of you, anonymous, unrealized, insignificant.” Despite their feigned rapt attention and forced cherubic smiles, every kid in that classroom was thinking the same thing, “Yeah, I remember too, it was all of two weeks ago!”